“Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.”
~ Gary Snyder
Taking place.
It’s dark.
Really, completely dark.
I can hear and feel the chunky gravel and its pointy rolling crunch underfoot as I inch my way down the long winding hill of the driveway. So, for a fleeting instant, I am almost, as they say, all ears— with a liberal dash of sole-sense coming up from the tentative, searching feet that have, at least during these first few yards, kept me from tripping over some unseen thing. The declivity, the palpable reality of the possibility of walking, and perhaps falling, downhill, feels exciting. Committed to wave-riding, I spend less time in this rolling and rocky country, and am up for a just few days from the flat wide Coastal Plain where the surf breaks. I fall down in the water all the time, but down is a different direction when you’re flying along the face of a wave with water to welcome you in. The surface my feet creep along now is impenetrable, hard, and not fit for human entry. The welcome I feel from this land is, in this sense only, purely superficial.
In addition to the twenty years I’ve lived here, at least some days and nights of the year, part of what makes this hillside feel like home is that I’m not so far from the subdivision where I grew up. The place where my first memories of exploration and discovery formed in relation to the fractal and chaotic shapes of the trees and branches, riffles and creek banks, and the rolling hills with occasional rocky outcrops that seemed to emerge from an enchanted underground world that began just behind our brick ranch— a house defined, as they all were, by the Euclidean predictable. This day’s darkness is one of the first subfreezing nights of the year here in the North Carolina Piedmont, in the upper reaches of the river basin where most of my 20,000 odd days (and nights) as a human in the world have taken place.
It’s a beautiful phrase.
To “take place.”
I’ve spent my plentiful awake-in-the-dark hours during these long nights of this 2020 Solstice season trying to learn from the darkness of the places, and of this time, instead of automatically obscuring it with electric (or electronic) light and all that the light brings with it. Instead of treating darkness like a not-place between real places that are lit, like an interstate, that needs to be sped through to get to the destination, I’m trying to feel the reality that darkness is crucial, even if it is a passage. So, after all, are lit days. But, especially this year, darkness feels like it might be a place of richer inception, even conception. Births, and deaths, the end of a love story, or the beginning of one, always take place in some form of mysterious darkness. Like taking tea, or water, or a rest, it seems there might be a way in which that phrase, “it took place,” is a verbal nod to the idea that the separation between a life and the place of its unfolding, between time and space, is not as straightforward as it might seem. Some combination of the nature of our human senses and the ways our story-telling language and habitual thinking distinguish life and place (character, plot, and setting) from one another encourages us to treat them as wildly different ways of discovering- like pipes emptying into a lake, rather than currents mixing and swirling in an ocean, forming one inseparable body. In our culture, we are dominated by a chronological, here-to-then and never back again, linear time-sense. And we naturally favor the bandwidth of perceptions that comes through our eyes, our sight. Most of our brain is busy working through incoming visual information most of the time. We definitely have a prejudice in favor of light. We kill darkness before knowing what it could teach us, what it intends for us. And so the ancient parts of us that know what to learn from it (Stillness? Vulnerability? Awareness that our eyes weren’t built to see all there is?).
I, a photographer for life, am a case in point. The contraption I’m carrying as I halt down this hill, obscured by a beautiful blackness, is screwed onto a heavy tripod so it can be still while it receives the light of the never-still universe, the visible kind of light, that is, the sliver of spectrum that we humans can see. The photograph will, if I’m wildly lucky, merit the attention of the other humans who take a span of their precious sacred life-time to look at the image these visible wavelengths will make from 0s and 1s. If it feels whatever brand of right-and-true I’ve come to look for, I will send this image through screens that stream light to people’s eyes in the very spectrum denied to me now. Perhaps it might spark a few, or even one to go out (or in) to the dark. I know in my brain and heart that there is some of that visible light out here with me but, at midlife, one of the alterations in vision I’m learning to appreciate is that my eyes are far slower than my feet in the passage out of a well-lit room into a moonless night.
Now, after 20,000 nights, darkness is more abundant with the gifts of longer study in the lessons of not-seeing, of disorientation, and of unknowing. On the other hand, falling down (the hill country kind of down) onto gravel offers a lesson I don’t need to learn again so the cautious crawling steps continue. I move by feel and memory of this place (it must be time to wind left a little… now back right). And I look up and down into the thick ephemeral darkness, the nothingness-for-now. This fleeting not-seeing is a delicious gift that won’t last because I’m really looking for the things that will allow me to steer without thinking, to become less aware of the impacts, every single one of them, of my feet— each one, on the ground—this ground. I will soon once again take them (and the ground) for granted. I’ll start to live the journey and not each step as I head for the vantage point, the viewing place I’m after. I hope it’s an honorable perspective, that place I made note of last night, halfway up the next hill where I thought I saw a possibility, a chance to take a photograph that might point toward the darker kind of knowing. In her beautiful book, Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes that we often automatically associate darkness with the tomb and let it scare us, as death tends to, not with the womb and all the hope of gestating future life. In doing so, we blind ourselves in ways that 20/20 vision can’t help with.
This bit of the Piedmont I’m currently blinded to gets its name because it is foothills to the ancient, worn Appalachian Mountains. This particular neighborhood in the woods has felt like home for a long time and, although most of my life takes place on sandy ground, this is and, I suspect, always will be, home. It’s a strip of land between spreading urban centers that is still just barely rural enough to have a time of day that feels like night, especially now. The slimmest sliver of the moon, nearly new, set just past sunset. So now it’s as dark as dark can be here, with uncountable sodium vapor lights a couple dozen miles in either direction.
Many small steps later, as I feel the hill of the driveway flatten out into the road, I can finally see stars. Slowly, slowly, the places that remain dark, the ones I can’t see those thousands of lit points from the past, begin to define themselves as the branching gestures of the trees who live with me here, in this oak hickory forest. To me they are not usually oaks and hickories (and beeches and cedars and sourwoods) in the same way my other intimate loved ones (the human kind) are not usually their broadest categories. My mother is, after all, certainly a woman of European descent but I don’t go around categorizing her as such in my mind- she’s just Mom. Instead, these trees are this long-loved one with that expressive shape (doesn’t it look like it’s in a state of exuberant praise?) and that one over there with that evocative form (have you ever seen a more determined posture?). And then that one (look how considerate it is, holding its crown in its own space, reaching for the tree next door while leaving it exactly as much room as it needs to grow).
This place, the one in which (from which?) my life events have taken place, is one of the greatest abundance, a neighborhood of towering privilege, to be sure. Here I am fortunate enough to share time and place with the beings whose shapes and textures and calls and snorts I have ingested into memory. It and they transform the present from a piece of linear time into a big country, an expanse without borders, filled with a kind of magic. This sort of woodland, the branches now newly bare, used to feel like it was full of giants looking down at me. And now, in this coming winter of the Year of the Plague, there have been so many books (Braiding Sweetgrass, Hidden Life of Trees and Mycelium Running) and shows (episodes of The Crown, repeated), more social outings walking than sitting, and more time in the places that don’t require planes and crowds of people. So, much more time to be with these long-loved ones. The additional time in these woods of home, through the spring and summer, and now, headed into this darkest of dark winters, has opened me up to the possibility of trees that seem to be speaking, who might be holding forth with a poetic Answer Which Is Really A Question– an expansive, open one, only lived, never answered. Just because they ask in a language I can’t hear, doesn’t make it less true or crucial. I don’t know if I’m listening well but I do see that now, with branches newly bare, their poetry is written with such spare elegance, all dressed in the arboreal equivalent of formal-wear, showing off their fractal glory, dispensing their most practiced, most sophisticated teachings about how the shape of a small acts replicates on a larger scale. They sing the songs of this theme slowly, over years, in a voice from above that sounds beyond my vision-heavy expectations of The Beautiful, stripped of flourish or flower, but with the clarity, the ancient authority of the anointed. This place, this home, is one I’d hoped to have already left by now. I was supposed to be somewhere warm, a place I have come to know as a second home in a jungle village on the northwest coast of Costa Rica. Because in addition to not being able to see so well in the dark, I have become less able to endure the cold waves of winter for as long as I’d like to be surfing every day.
At least, that’s why I first went to Costa Rica. Then there were, there are, all the reasons that came into focus as I kept going back. For one, it is a place where there really is a night. The development hasn’t reached the point of erasing the dark so, when you step out from the jungle path onto the beach, the stars almost knock you over with a wave of seeing and instantaneous expansion that makes you feel both tiny and part of the hugeness. It looks-sounds-smells-feels something like a sudden crescendo in an anthem rousing you with an irresistible calling about what you should now do with your life. And then it builds even further, this music about where your life is taking place. Perhaps the bounding, limiting walls you’ve erected in your light-time thoughts aren’t as close as you thought? Or as high? Perhaps your small acts of love and vulnerability might replicate on a scale you never imagined possible?
In other words, I was supposed to be in a place where I don’t have to work very hard to remember to look up into the darkness. And I don’t require discipline to look down into more darkness, the jungle paths that, I hope, offer safe passage between the many, many slithering, skittering, sleeping intelligences whose place-from-which-lives-take is in that tangled green of never-ending tropical growth. Looking up into the darkness-and-light of sky and the total darkness of a teeming forest all around is something we are losing or, perhaps, have lost. Most of us live in places where the night sky has disappeared, retreated. And, in what strikes me as a particularly significant upending of the ways we evolved and who and how we know, we now look down into cold electronic light so habitually that we have lost the sense that down and darkness can go together in the most instructive ways. Didn’t we, at one point, greet the darkness with fires? Fires that we then gathered around to talk story to one another, to join and recreate our interwoven threads of ourselves in place? Didn’t the light we looked down at in the dark bring us comfort and connection, rather than the separation and fear we so often encounter in our handheld lights-in-the dark? Firelight is also engaging and powerful but it’s a kind of light that comes with immediate, bodily understanding when it burns us. What if, instead of just looking at these powerful, lit portals to human knowing and doings we went, even just with our wonder, far enough down, there, beneath the ground? There would be a lightless place we can easily believe is there. It’s a place whose heavens we can feel with our feet and know that it is both teeming with and crucial to life. It’s an invisible place that holds our ancestors, and the mineral seeds of our progeny, a place where trees talk to one another, and care for one another, a place where all we know and love comes from and returns. And it could help us hold our longer memories, the ones we need as animals, as a species, as embodiments and stewards of our habitats, the places from which our lives take their livings. It’s a darkness of inherent meaning, beyond our senses and mostly just beyond us, and therefore, a source of mystery and, possibly, of faith. A place where something as ordinary as an occasional rocky outcrop, an emissary of the underworld, might once again enchant our days and nights. We can’t reflect on what we can’t see if we never open ourselves to the not-seeing, to the darkness.
But, it’s the Solstice time and I am not in Costa Rican jungle, where I’d expected to welcome the darkness of the longest night. This year, like many of us, I have decided to heed the public health advice and not travel by plane, not go south for the winter, not have a life that takes that place into its growing sedimentary layers of memory, into the having been-ness of its never fixed self. It is, of course, sad for me but, surprisingly, the sense of impending doom I generally feel when the water temperature drops is not the stiffest challenge. That turns out to be missing the other humans with whom I share so much passion for the warm waves, the green water, the jungle, and dark nights full of stars. But missing precious humans carries its own lessons and I am working on being a receptive, curious student.
So, this year I will be mostly back and forth between my usual Southeastern U.S. places, up and downstream in the Cape Fear River basin. Perhaps, after she gets her vaccine (but before I get mine?) I will drive to Florida to see my mother, who lives independently and hasn’t had real human company since before the vernal equinox. Like the rest of you, we’ve been Zooming and FaceTiming like mad but, well, you all know. You can’t simultaneously be on the Zoom and feeling the vast dark of night, of all there is, together.
All you can really share is human language with its best possible virtual embodiment in facial expressions and gestures. As thankful as I am for all of this technology right now, it makes me keenly aware of how important it is that at least some of what we share with our human loved ones, with our partners and friends, teachers and students, colleagues and neighbors take place in the more-than-human world. At its hard-won, rarely achieved best, our language is clear enough that it becomes a facet of a much more complex, indecipherable truth. It’s a truth beyond what it means to be a smart or wise or even visionary human. If we are honest with ourselves about what it means to be us, we know even our truest truth isn’t whole and never will be. Although it can reflect our visible spectrum of knowledge and feeling with its own awesome clarity, we lose something essential to being human when we only use our language and the light of our learning only to retell what we are told by ourselves. One way we repeat our own knowings and miss out on the mystery is by discerning what we feel and learn from being in the places where the very built and lit environment inevitably tells us what and how to feel, whether we realize it or not. It’s what allows us to read or watch The Crown late into the night but it also makes the dark a not-place between places. When we don’t take that elixir of mysterious, life-giving limits, of right-hereness, we weaken our capacity to inhabit, perhaps even to learn from and love, not just night but all of the cold darkness of life. When we don’t have a chance to speak or stay silent in a context, a place, a time that connects us to our not-knowing, and not-seeing, to how dark and big and, yes, after we let our eyes adjust, how light-filled the surrounding darkness the night sky can be. When there’s no room in our world to sense the other facets of animal, plant, mineral sensing and knowing, well, then we lose any chance of feeling whole, of knowing wholeness. It is its own kind of dis-ease. My own hope for this winter of so much hardship, so much sadness and loss, fear and denial, anger and outrage, is to be able to spend more time learning from what I can’t see and settling into not knowing what I can’t know.
I hope you all have a mysterious, beautiful, and healthy Solstice.
